Withings WiFi Body Scale

I'm enjoying everything about the WiFi Body Scale that Withings sent me -- except for the number that shows up when I step on it (but that's not their fault). This scale wirelessly sends my weight, fat mass, and BMI to a personal web page at Withings.com and to my Google Health page, my RunKeeper account, and my DailyBurn account.

To set it up, I connected it to my computer with a USB cable and filled out some information online. The USB port is hidden in the scale's battery compartment because you only have to use the cable once. After that, all I have to do is step on the scale. There are no buttons or on-off switch. It's a very nice looking, solid-feeling gadget, that does one thing and does it flawlessly. It's a great device for self trackers.

Withings WiFi Body Scale on Amazon

• [jwz]

  It looks cool, but the fact that the only way to get data out of it is by first sharing that data with a third party is a deal breaker. Aside from the knee-jerk privacy reaction, this means that when the company discontinues the product and shuts down the web site, now the hardware has become useless too.

  • [Xenu]

    It’s not that hard to guess how much someone weighs by looking at them. Since I’m a third party, and we both live in the same city, you are potentially sharing the same information (your weight) with a third party (me) simply by walking outside your house.

• [tikaro]

  I’ve been using my WiThings scale since January (it was a Christmas present.) You can share your weight via a URL. Here’s mine:
  http://bit.ly/ahcw4M

  I’ve been on a brilliant-and-draconian weight-loss motivation plan created by my friend Randy called “Lose It or Lose It” — put up money, and then if you don’t make your weekly weight-loss goals, you LOSE YOUR OWN MONEY (conversely, if you make your goals, you keep every red cent!)

  The program has been going great for me, so far I’ve lost over twenty pounds. Here’s my profile, where you can see pictures of my feet on the scale:
  http://loseitorloseit.com/tikaro

  As you can see, the pictures are of my OLD, integer-number-only scale. That’s because a glass scale gives you a WHOLE NEW PERSPECTIVE (literally) on your junk. It’s a bit startling, frankly :)

• [LeSinge]

  Keep in mind that A.) A scale can’t measure fat mass, B.) BMI is patently absurd for anyone that is short, tall, or muscular.
  If your goal is to simply lose weight and you want a number to help keep on track, great. But also realize that if you’ve never worked out before you will generally build muscle while you drop fat and your weight loss won’t be as apparent (depending on how much fat you have to lose). This can be really discouraging for people that think the scale is a really good way to measure their results.

  • [Aloisius]

    While a scale can’t measure actual % fat mass, it can give you a value that is off by a consistent amount. This allows you to do trending – I can tell if I have more or less fat today than I did a year ago. Even adjusting for the error induced by hydration is pretty easy once you have a hundred measurements.

    This scale could be incredibly useful to get an understanding of long term trends. It helps you get away from the “omg I’m up a pound since last time” mindset and get into the “I’ve been been generally losing weight over the last three months” frame of mind.

• [OoOoOo]

  Just wait until the Ana / Mia kids get a hold of this one!

• [Opspin]

  I’d like to point out my fellow Dane’s unboxing of the Withings scale. Looks like something Apple designed.

• [Anonymous]

  So how does one tare this thing? If I want to weigh my cat on most inexpensive digital scales I step on the scale, tell it to tare, then pick up the cat and check the reading. On this $150+ scale there doesn’t seem to be that option.

• [Agies]

  I’ve heard that it can also tweet your weigh-ins to the masses if you so desire.

• [Moriarty]

  Now Google can tailor ads to your exact body type!

• [Anonymous]

  What happens when Withings goes belly-up? Looks like this scale’s wifi is limited to contacting the Withings database through some proprietary/secure process. I guess closed data standards and rights restrictions are verboten for music and books but A-OK for weight information.

• [Egypt Urnash]

  So what happens if your SO/kid/dog/visitor steps on it?

  • [Agies]

    From what I heard on TWiT, it will recognize radical changes in weight/fat mass and ask if you want to register a new user. From then on it’s supposed to recognize registered users automatically.

  • [netsharc]

    It recognizes significantly different weight/BMI/fat masses and the site has “user profiles” :)

    I don’t like the idea that they put their data on the cloud (then again, this could make an interesting regional comparisons (esp. if they can geo-locate your WiFi SSID or you entered your address on their site)), it’d be more interesting if you can harvest the data yourself: it should be easy, set up a router with a DNS hijack so all updates get sent to your own server. Then again, presumably it has SSL (is a hacker interested in your weight anyway? Maybe TMZ is), so that might complicate things.

• [Aloisius]

  I’ve seriously considered buying one of these (so much so it is currently within my Amazon shopping cart), but their website doesn’t seem to provide much in the way of technical details and I haven’t seen too many deep reviews.

  I like to do forecasting, can you export my weight measurements to a file and plot them out myself?

  How accurate is the body fat measurement (my other scale does an inconsistently awful job)? I’d settle for consistency over accuracy so at least the trends are right.

  • [netsharc]

    One comment on the Amazon page says you can do a CSV export, data importable to your favorite spreadsheet program.

• [Anonymous]

  have any hemiplegics tried this device? i am a stroke survivor and left hemi, and in my experience, only commercial grade tamita scales work for me. i suspect it is because i cannot evenly distribute my (too much) mass across both legs. every other electronic scale i’ve used says “error”.

• [Anonymous]

  That’s the heaviest iPhone I’ve never seen.

• [caffeine addict]

  Bloody hell, that’s a heavy iPhone…

  • [Chuck]

    >Bloody hell, that’s a heavy iPhone…

    AHA! The photo must be one of those clues hinting at Apple’s future product development. I’ll bet Apple is working on developing new substances that will make the 164.5 pound iPhone a reality.

• [HermanBubbert]

  A solution in search of a problem.

• [WeightedCompanionCube]

  Anon #16 – if you want the feature in a fancy scale, you need spend a bit more.. ~$300 will buy you a Wii and Wii Fit. Once you’ve weighed in, it will detect sudden changes and tell you the difference. It’s even in the manual under “weighing your pets”

  Nice to know my weight is steady but my cat is getting pudgy.

• [Edubya]

  I’ve been tracking my weight online for two plus years on zeaLOG. iphone specific mobile interface to boot. http://zealog.com/zealogs/insurmountable-poundage-take-2

• [Coal]

  According to the Amazon page:

  “Frequently Bought Together
  Customers buy this item with Star Trek (Three-Disc Edition) [Blu-ray] ”

  I know there’s a difference between cause and correlation, but this is very telling.

• [DisneyBoy]

  I would pay good money for a blood pressure monitor like this. I’ve searched high and low for one but I have had no luck.

  If anyone is aware of one, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know.

• [Anonymous]

  I got one about 3 weeks ago. It’s amazing- my wife and I use it and it hasn’t screwed up figuring out who was who. It’s incredibly accurate and fun to see the numbers (hopefully) go down.

  The online dashboard is also great.

  For folks who like tracking this stuff, I would also highly recommend the FitBit…another really terrific product.